Qatar Helium Shutdown Puts Chip Supply Chain On a Two-Week Clock (tomshardware.com) 125
Iranian drone strikes shut down a major helium facility in Qatar, removing about 30% of global helium supply and raising concerns for the semiconductor industry, which relies on the gas for chip fabrication. "QatarEnergy declared force majeure on existing contracts on March 4, freeing it from supply obligations to customers," reports Tom's Hardware. The industry outlet Gasworld reports that no imminent restart is planned. From the report: Helium consultant Phil Kornbluth, speaking at a Gasworld webinar on March 4, said that if the outage extends beyond roughly two weeks, industrial gas distributors could be forced to relocate cryogenic equipment and revalidate supplier relationships, a process that could stretch over months regardless of when Qatari output resumes.
South Korea is among the most exposed countries, which, according to the Korea International Trade Association, imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025. The country relies heavily on helium imports to cool silicon wafers during fabrication and is understood to have no viable substitute.
The country's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources has reportedly launched an investigation into supply and demand for 14 semiconductor materials and equipment types with high dependence on Middle Eastern sources, Nikkei reported on Wednesday. Bromine, which is used in circuit formation, is another big concern, with South Korea sourcing 90% of its imports from Israel, also party to the ongoing conflict in Iran.
South Korea is among the most exposed countries, which, according to the Korea International Trade Association, imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025. The country relies heavily on helium imports to cool silicon wafers during fabrication and is understood to have no viable substitute.
The country's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources has reportedly launched an investigation into supply and demand for 14 semiconductor materials and equipment types with high dependence on Middle Eastern sources, Nikkei reported on Wednesday. Bromine, which is used in circuit formation, is another big concern, with South Korea sourcing 90% of its imports from Israel, also party to the ongoing conflict in Iran.
Helium can be re-used? (Score:3)
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Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:5, Informative)
Industrial and medical uses of helium require very high purity. What gets used in party balloons is basically the impure waste left over from processing (that has no feasible process to purify sufficiently for other use).
Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:5, Insightful)
Industrial and medical uses of helium require very high purity. What gets used in party balloons is basically the impure waste left over from processing (that has no feasible process to purify sufficiently for other use).
I find it hard to believe that it can't be reclaimed since
there's no pure source to begin with afaik so it has to be purified somehow.
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Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:5, Informative)
I find it hard to believe that it can't be reclaimed since there's no pure source to begin with afaik so it has to be purified somehow.
It's a question of source. High purity helium is actually quite easy to create from its source. You take natural gas, you make LNG, and what you capture as off-gassing during the process has a significant portion of helium which is relatively easy to purify. But critically the single most energy intensive step in this entire process is incredibly cost lucrative as the primary product: LNG, sells for a shit-ton of money for a given volume.
But then you start to transfer your pure helium, and in the process some of it off-gasses, mixes with air, nitrogen, and other impurities. This off-gas is re-captured but then is typically not remotely financially justified to send back to another purification step, especially since it now has a different gas composition with different impurities including an oxidiser which would require a different purification process. No one will pay for that.
So they just throw it into a party balloon.
To think of it another way, we can create pure water through distillation. But there's a reason we use reverse osmosis filtration instead when we treat water in bulk. Just because we "can" do something, doesn't mean it's viable to do at any meaningful scale.
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Sounds like that justification will start happening in less than 2 weeks, huh?
Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:5, Informative)
At one point I looked into helium extraction as a byproduct of liquid oxygen/nitrogen plants, which are pretty common globally (neon, argon, krypton and xenon are already produced as a byproduct of them;. By volume, He is ~4x as common as Kr and ~58x as common as Xe, and is easy to separate from the other noble gases (though by mass, He is only 20% as common as Kr, 1,8x as common as Xe). But it's historically been much more expensive way to produce helium than from fossil sources, where it accumulates to normally 20-200x as concentrated as in the atmosphere, ~1000x in economical deposits (helium can also accumulate in e.g. geothermal gases)
Helium prices start at ~$100/kg / ~$20/l and go up from there. Krypton prices start at ~$400/kg / ~$1500/l and go up from there. Xenon starts at ~$2100/kg / ~$12000/l and goes up from there (in all cases, things like purity greatly affect the costs). So to compute ($/kg) / relative gravimetric abundance and ($/l) / relative volumetric abundance:
He: ~100, ~20
Kr: ~2000, ~400
Xe: ~1100, ~213
So some naive trend extrapolation would suggest that producing helium from air this way would cost about an order of magnitude more than it does from fossil resources (though the actual number would be a lot more complex to determine than that... helium is easy to separate from other noble gases, to its advantage, but also price isn't going to be a linear relation to abundance, and also, if you don't have as much demand for the other gases being recovered, then their prices will drop and helium's will rise)
TL/DR: natural gas does us a lot of favours in terms of keeping helium prices down :)
Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed but to add to the problem, extraction isn't the only issue. The purification step is a killer at small volumes. Air Separation Units typically don't run colder than the boiling point of nitrogen. The resulting mixture you get out of them will contain 4x the volume of neon as it does helium so you still need a purification step (which involves an extra liquification step) that is significantly more energy intensive than running an ASU. It's a lot of capital investment and significant energy input required to purify helium for a small volume production.
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I'm not sure how much of an issue that will be, to be honest. A third of helium is for cryogenic applications where you have to make it that cool anyway; neon itself is a desired product, and specifically desired without having a large helium contamination; and also there's non-cryogenic means to separate helium from neon, as helium is vastly more permeable than neon.
But it is a good point that it's an extra potential cost to consider.
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Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, because the stuff that spews out of the ground along with shittonnes of methane and a bunch of other volatile hydrocarbons is much easier to purify than that used stuff that comes out of gross machines.
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It is. No, really it is. Composition here matters a lot, but even more importantly the supply chain itself matters. Purifying helium contaminated with a typical hydrocarbon stream from underground is a very different problem from purifying helium that is contaminated in a different way. Purifying helium in a continuous off-gas stream from a fixed LNG facility is a different question than capturing end user off-gases or batch off-gasses contaminated during helium movement (where most party balloon helium com
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This is the actual problem, not the purification. In the past we didn't recycle any helium, then it got more expensive and so things like MRI machines started getting fitted with recondensers so they don't need to be filled anywhere near as often. It's still cheap enough that we don't bother shipping it back to purification plants. It's also still plentiful enough that we don't bother purifying it all completely even at the source and that excess, along with some of the p
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RE cooling, just last week saw this @NileRed YT video about how he pieced together a liquid nitrogen making setup.
(kind of at the level of assembling a PC, not deeper manufacturing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
(supposedly it can go low enough to also do helium, but he hasn't tackled that yet)
Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is joke of course. Was angling for the same joke.
3He is normal helium atom with an extra neutron, hoped to be used in some forms of fusion. It's not considered radioactive. Emitted by the sun it's trapped in lunar rock possibly at concentrations of up to 50 parts per billion but more likely 5-10ppb. The utility of extracting it from the Moon is hotly debated. On Earth isolating it from normal helium involves the same sort of centrifuge used to isolate isotopes of uranium, radium, hydrogen but there is far less of it than in lunar soil.
This is not actually the case in the subject at hand. It's all normal helium. When cooled enough all other gases will precipitate out as they freeze - including Hydrogen - leaving only helium as a gas and so easily isolated. That's actually why it's valuable since it's the only gas that will boil off at temperatures so low that the conductors immersed in the fluid will superconduct supporting the currents necessary for the intense electromagnets used in imaging and such. /Explaining nerd jokes since 1983
Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:5, Informative)
3He is normal helium atom with an extra neutron
3He is an isotope of Helium with one fewer neutron than the normal 4He.
Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:4, Insightful)
We do not. What goes into party balloons is orders of magnitude not pure enough for industrial uses.
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Re:Helium can be re-used? (Score:5, Informative)
It can be. It's just going to cost money.
Purifying Helium is simple in principle: Just make it VERY cold. Every other element or molecule will turn to liquid or solid and can be drained or filtered away. What's left is pure helium. The problem is that it takes a significant amount of energy and technical effort to get the temperature down to where it needs to be. You have to get it down to between 4.2 and 20.28 Kelvin to really get it purified.
So it's all about cost. If you go to the effort and cost to collect all the helium gas used in the manufacturing and recycle it, then there's no shortage. But it costs money.
Also note that Helium is a renewable resource. It comes from the alpha decay of radioisotopes deep in the Earth's crust and collects in gas pockets that can be mined for it. So we're not doomed if a little of it is wasted: But we should be careful with it anyway.
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But you're going to have to liquify it anyway, for any serious scientific or medical use.
(Except for using it in weather balloons, or airships)
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That's how it is made in the first place, but quite critically it is done so through an existing step that also produces a shitton of money: Cooling natural gas. Not only has natgas got helium in it in higher concentrations than any other natural source, that initial cooling step is paid for through the production of LNG. But the bigger issue is one of logistics. You take the LNG processing offgas and run it through a helium purification step, often an adsorber and carbon filter. This is something easy to d
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It's not a question of can or can't it's a question of economics. Helium created from purifying natural gas is an industrial process that runs continuously at volume from a source that among other things has economies benefitting from the fact that the most energy intensive step of the process (chilling) is paid for by the production of LNG (which is how we have a high helium concentration stream that is already really really cold in the first place).
The low purity stuff is contaminated down stream, often a
Boil-off and helium, the escape artist (Score:2)
Helium boils off easily given it liquefies only at 4 kelvin and below. It's also an escape artist. It can seep through metal and glass, and can even climb the walls of a Dewar to defy gravity.
Suck It China (Score:2)
U.S. Helium prices about to moon, Yo.
Not surprised (Score:1)
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US still in the LNG biz, so I imagine they are also doing a helium extraction.
The USA was and still is the single largest producer of pure Helium and the country with the single largest proven reserves, as well as strategic reserves. Qatar's 30% supply puts them in #2 in the world. Still, subtract 30% of any supply chain and something will break.
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The US supply is reserved for the Macy's Day parade.
Let's not forget our priorities.
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The last of the US federal helium reserve - including land and equipment - was sold in 2024.
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98% of the rest of the US Strategic Mineral Reserve has been sold off over the last quarter century, including Gallium. China controls 99% of the world supply of gallium, which is necessary to build advanced radars used by the THAAD air defense system, and China refuses to sell more to be used by manufacturers of military hardware. Iranian attacks have destroyed all of the major US/Israeli radar installations in the region, which is why they're moving the THAAD install from South Korea to Israel.
So Rump's
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They haven't attacked Yemen, Egypt or Pakistan or India yet.
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Yemen & Egypt are beyond their range. Pakistan has been supportive of them, although they flipped to declare their support to Saudi Arabia when IRGC missiles hit Riyadh. India has so far stayed neutral in this conflict
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
Luckily in 2024 we found another HUGE supply of Helium in Minnesota.
Thomas Abraham-James, CEO of Pulsar Helium, said the confirmed presence of helium could be one of the most significant such finds in the world. CBS News Minnesota toured the drill site soon after the drill rig first broke ground at the beginning of February [2024]. The discovery happened more than three weeks later at about 2 a.m. Thursday, as a drill reached its depth of 2,200 feet below the surface. According to Abraham-James, the helium concentration was measured at 12.4%, which is higher than forecasted and roughly 30 times the industry standard for commercial helium. "12.4% is just a dream. It's perfect," he said.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
What annoys me about the "2 weeks" things is that that's totally self inflicted "zero inventory" manufacturing BS that financial engineers choose to engage in. So a lot of manufacturing is very susceptible to disruptions in feedstock deliveries because they want to save some miniscule percentage by but building a bigger storage tank and not floating a 1 month supply on their books instead of 2 weeks.
The downside being that a bigger than anticipated blizzard and maybe a truck crash and bam the plant is idled for a week
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He said financial engineers.
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Wow man, so you're like saying .. there's some kind of ... cost/benefit analysis that can be done? Whoa dude. You should write some kind of like, business book, or something.
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Might want to figure out that "two week supply" does not equal "zero inventory" first.
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Might want to figure out that "two week supply" does not equal "zero inventory" first.
"zero inventory" is what the philosophy is called https://www.netsuite.com/porta... [netsuite.com]
But more relevant in this case is that the two weeks thing is just a scare quote in the headline.
If i'd read TFA the first time... i'd see that the actual semiconductor people quoted said there were no problems. And the "two week" was from some consultant who said that in two weeks the SUPPLIERS of helium to industry would start to THINK about relocating production and finding some replacement suppliers for raw feedstock.
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Yes, because it sounds much scarier than the "not as much inventory as I happen to think they should have" philosophy.
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Financial engineers are not engineers. Proper engineers understand redundancy and risk management. These clowns only understand greed.
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
that's totally self inflicted "zero inventory" manufacturing BS that financial engineers choose to engage in.
Today I'll make an exception and defend the beancounters.
For the past decades, the world operated under the assumption that the major leaders wanted peace, and took competent advice on geopolitics. Supporting Israel to remain a sizeable regional power was enough to "keep Iran from doing something stupid". Iran bombing critical Qatari facilities was therefore a low risk, and industries calculated their needs based on that. This is part of what got us the incredibly inexpensive electronics we had just yesterday.
The rationale and the calculations only changed now that "the US doing something stupid" became a possibility. It's easy to ask, why not 1 month or 2 months of storage of critical materials. The thing is there are way too many critical materials in complex industries to store. It's only feasible for industries whose costs are protected, like defence. In a market pushed by consumer goods where people click on the cheapest deal, it isn't feasible.
Or you need strong regulations to oblige companies to do so. But while you can compel Western companies e.g. "Intel" to increase their costs and take stocks, you can't reach foreign competitors; you're just giving more advantage to the products made by the likes of Longsoon and MediaTek.
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Within the previously existing Israel-Iran conflict, there was no immediate reason for the bombings to spread to Qatar. With Iran directly at war with a larger power, and kills on their highest leaders, the Iranian regime has nothing more to lose, so they make the war spread and as painful as possible.
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As opposed to Israel actually attacking their neighbors? Repeatedly.
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This is the crux. Optimization of supply chains to eliminate inventory makes them frail. Or, to quote Wirth:
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
by but building a bigger storage tank and not floating a 1 month supply on their books instead of 2 weeks
You're talking as if storage of helium at high purity is an easy thing. It's not remotely. Large scale helium needs a cryogenic storage unit. The more you have the more money you are continuously burning in keeping it liquid and pure. The bigger your tank, the more offgas is wasted.
The best analogy would be, you're talking about building a bigger storage shed in your back yard as if size is all that matters. But helium storage is more like hiring a bigger bulk storage facility, one where you pay continuously for the volume you hire, all the while thieves take a little bit more depending on how much you rent.
This is far more than financial engineering, there are actual real engineering problems involved in this kind of storage.
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The reason Tim Cook was Job's right hand man and Job's choice of heir was because he was a master at exactly this kind of minimizing-inventory nonsense. Which... well, Apple isn't the powerhouse of innovation it once was.
At the same time, the opposite leads to stupidity like Commodore releasing the A600 in the early 1990s, desperate to do something with its warehouses of obsolete 16 bit chipsets. (Yes, I know technically the story behind the A600 was more complicated, but there's little doubt in my mind it
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The reason Tim Cook was Job's right hand man and Job's choice of heir was because he was a master at exactly this kind of minimizing-inventory nonsense. Which... well, Apple isn't the powerhouse of innovation it once was.
To be fair to Tim Cook, though, he was (and remains) very good at it, and probably has a better appreciation of supply chain risk than most. Even during the supply chain difficulties during COVID (chip shortages, shipping delays, and so on), you didn't hear about Apple throttling production or having bare shelves.
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What annoys me about the "2 weeks" things is that that's totally self inflicted "zero inventory" manufacturing BS that financial engineers choose to engage in. So a lot of manufacturing is very susceptible to disruptions in feedstock deliveries because they want to save some miniscule percentage by but building a bigger storage tank and not floating a 1 month supply on their books instead of 2 weeks.
Yeah, if only the U.S. had an enormous strategic reserve of this critical, non-renewable, industrial material of global significance. Oh wait, we did. Then the geniuses in the federal government [wikipedia.org] started selling off the inventory (flooding the market, leading to artificially low prices and profligate waste), then privatized the rest.
Who could have foreseen??!
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Thanks. I was wondering how does Qatar, of all countries, end up w/ Helium, something that's abundant in space but rare on earth
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It's a byproduct of extracting natural gas, which Qatar also supplies in large quantities. Instead of just the feedstock, they decided to refine the helium themselves and sell the end product (for more profits). Seems pretty reasonable overall, but I agree - not obvious.
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Said... (Score:5, Funny)
>"Helium consultant Phil Kornbluth, speaking at a Gasworld webinar on March 4, said"
But did he say it in an unusually high-toned/comical voice?
Re:Said... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Said... (Score:4, Informative)
Helium naturally escapes from your lungs. SF6 will accumulate, displace air, and suffocate you by surprise unless you turn yourself upside down. Nitrogren too.
Fun fact: it's the buildup of co2 in your lungs that compels you to breathe and makes you feel like you're not getting enough air. If the oxygen is quietly displaced but the co2 still gets out, you don't notice until you have a problem. Carbon monoxide works the same way: silently.
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This is incorrect. Lungs are efficient at mixing gases and so breathing SF6 is safe, as long as you give yourself breaks to re-oxygenate.
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Gee whillikers, it's a good thing we don't breathe nitrogen on a regular basis!
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You better be careful about breathing any amount of nitrogen, apparently. I heard it settles in your lungs and will "suffocate you by surprise unless you turn yourself upside down."
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The lungs move air around. About a litre of air remains in your lungs w
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Long ago, I was in a mainframe computer room when the Halon system accidentally discharged while a repairman was working on it. I left the room immediately, and once outside the door, tried speaking. My voice pitch was lowered. I saw refractive index shimmers, and decided to do forced exhales and inhales until my voice sounded normal, and no more shimmer appeared. I was aware of discussions of SF6 demonstration risk.
Even 17 years ago, the physics department at my local university was preparing to install a
Bye bye delusions (Score:1, Troll)
Seems like:
- history did not, in fact, end
- geography still matters
- military preparedness still matters
I've had several epiphanies in recent years. The most salient is that many of the -isms that capture the imagination from time to time are fantasies precisely because they require total buy-in from everyone, to a man, in order to have any hope of succeeding by their own metrics.
Socialism, communism, internationalism, libertarianism...all these things have obvious exploitable weaknesses that only a suffici
Re:Bye bye delusions (Score:4, Informative)
You finally realized that your president of peace is a warmongering kleptocrat rapist?
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"that only a sufficiently educated and credentialled person could possibly overlook."
that's a funny self-own if I've ever read one
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"capitalism" is a slur invented by Marxists. The people that you call capitalists don't believe in capitalism, they believe in free enterprise and private ownership.
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Of course they do. But only for them.
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Re: Bye bye delusions (Score:1)
Yes. Just like. Except without the owning other people like cattle.
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Adam Smith wrote 'Wealth of Nations' long before Karl Marx was even born.
Re:Bye bye delusions (Score:4, Insightful)
Your orange messiah just sent 2200 marines overseas and lifted sanctions on Russian oil.
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Vietnam started in a similar manner.
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Nah, we didn't open Vietnam by bombing Hanoi or killing Ho Chi Minh. Totally different situations.
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Thar's not fair at all. Hegseth doesn't watch bad war movies, he thinks he's playing in a war movie and is too stupid to see how bad it is. Imagine how hard it is on him to see that photographers constantly catch stupid looks on his face.
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I know that US Marines are the next thing to Captain America, but what are 2200 of them going to do against the 300,000-man Iranian army. I think someone has been watching too many bad war movies.
I expect they could successfully take control of the oil terminals on Kharg Island.
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Imagine getting serious about alternative energy and not giving a flying rat's ass about oil.
Re:Bye bye delusions (Score:5, Informative)
Yes you're right. One militaristic state has indeed brought down the entire edifice of interconnectedness. But I don't think it's the one you imply.
As represented by this administration, there is very little moral window dressing now. They don't even try. Heck the president is talking openly about eugenics. Everything old is new again.
So yes. Perpetual war is inevitable in this post-global, tribal world we now have. So you hope the US "wins" somehow. And then what?
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I mean, even if my side sucks ass and is evil, I'd still rather my team win then the other team winning. It's also not like the Iranians are some paragon of truth, justice and beauty. No country is innocent or pure.
I'm not remotely defending the United States here. Just saying, if, as an American citizen, I had to choose a winner, I'd prefer it be my asshole in charge then the Iranian asshole in charge.
Who knows, maybe after the Republicans crash the world economy, that will be enough to elevate the Democra
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I prefer my asshole go to hell, then we'll worry about that other asshole.
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When you say "Iranians", are you talking about the regime or the Iranian people?
The former is uniquely evil. The latter may not be paragons of virtue, but the least they deserve is to be free of that regime, and free of islam, as they wish. Beyond that, they'd have to sort out their own country themselves, but a good place to start is to not be a threat to others
just go back to hydrogen (Score:2)
just go back to hydrogen
Re: just go back to hydrogen (Score:3)
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clean up (Score:2)
The stable genius at work /s (Score:3)
Re:The stable genius at work /s (Score:5, Insightful)
U.S. National Helium Reserve (Score:2)
First helium from natural gas (Score:2)
When I was a post-doc at the Univ. of Kansas Chemistry Department the main hallway had a display about helium being discovered in natural gas. The display contained a sealed glass flask with some the helium.
See: https://news.ku.edu/news/artic... [ku.edu]
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There used to be a Helium Museum in Amarillo Texas. For a while Amarillo called itself the Helium Capital of the World.
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I meant that only they used them to tell the future. That is what toxicology is, looking at animal guts and trying to predict the future.
Oh, I thought that was what quants did. My bad.